Jim Grant’s father pursued a varied career, including studying the timpani. He even played for a while with the Pittsburgh Symphony. But the day came when he rethought his career choice. “For the Flying Dutchman overture,” says his son, “they had him cranking a wind machine.”
The younger Mr. Grant, who can be sardonic about his own chosen profession, might say he’s spent the past 28 years cranking a wind machine, though it would be a grossly unjust characterization. Mr. Grant is founder and writer of Grant’s Interest Rate Observer, perhaps the most iconic of the Wall Street newsletters. He is also one of Wall Street’s strongest advocates of the gold standard, knowing full well it would take away much of Wall Street’s fun.
You might say that, as a journalist and historian of finance, he has been in training his whole life for times like ours—in which the monetary disorders he has so astutely chronicled are reaching a crescendo. The abiding interest of Grant’s, both man and newsletter, has been the question of value, and how to know it. “Kids today talk about beer goggles—an especially sympathetic state of perception with regard to a member of the opposite sex,” he says of our current market environment. “We collectively wear interest-rate goggles because we see market values through the prism of zero-percent funding costs. Everything is distorted.”
General Mills hits out at ethanol subsidies
General Mills hit out at ethanol subsidies as a driver of rising food prices in the US, arguing that they needlessly fuel inflation.
“We’re driving up food prices unnecessarily,” Ken Powell, chief executive of General Mills, said in an interview with the Financial Times. “If corn prices go up, wheat goes up. It’s all linked.”
General Mills, which makes Cheerios cereal, Progresso soup and Häagen-Dazs ice-cream, is the world’s sixth-largest food company by revenues. It said last month that it expects its input costs to increase up to 11 per cent next year as it lowered its earnings forecast on inflation fears.
How the civic groups that once defined America are thriving abroad, and what it means for us.
One sweltering day last spring, out of curiosity and a long-standing interest in the old-fashioned American institutions of civic engagement, I stepped out of my apartment building in the nation’s capital and walked over to attend a nearby conference of the Toastmasters. Founded in a Southern California YMCA basement for the betterment of tongue-tied young men, the Toastmasters have been offering “practice and training in the art of public speaking” along with “sociability and good fellowship” since the mid-1920s. In my mind, the group harked back to a half-imagined America of bowling leagues, church barbecues, and Rotary signs on the edge of town. What was funny was that my apartment resided in a sandy, congested neighborhood of Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates.
Under the Arabian midday glare, I scurried across one of the city’s sprawling six-lane boulevards—past a billboard that months earlier had advertised the local Krispy Kreme’s “Ramadan Dozen” special—to reach the campus of a local women’s college that was hosting the event. When I arrived at the main auditorium, I found it humming with a 300-horsepower murmur. The place was packed with men and women in off-the-rack power suits, plus a few starched white robes and black abayas. The room was decked end-to-end with gold silk banners, each, to my amazement, representing a different local chapter of the Toastmasters. By itself, Abu Dhabi—a young boomtown of global migrants roughly the size of Milwaukee—harbors seventeen active chapters of the group, I learned. The UAE as a whole, with a population of about eight million people, has seventy-one chapters.
Tension on Government Subsidized Electronic Medical Records; Comments from Verona’s Epic Systems
The administration’s initiative takes on particular significance because this year is when the government begins spending billions of dollars to accelerate the adoption of computerized patient records.
The incentive payments, typically as much as $44,000 a physician, begin this year. But those payments require doctors to make “meaningful use” of “certified” electronic health records. The payments are staggered over five years, and to get the money physicians must use the technology for increasingly extensive record-keeping and reporting. The administration has not said whether a usability standard will be in the next stage of requirements, due by early next year.The government says it is committed to working with technology companies, medical professionals and academics, to adopt the best approach. Yet common ground has been elusive so far.
At a meeting last month at the National Institute of Standards and Technology in Gaithersburg, Md., Janet Campbell, a software developer at Epic Systems, a supplier of electronic health records, expressed the industry’s concerns. Doctors are discriminating consumers, she said, and companies like hers work on improving their products in the marketplace every day.
the Government should NOT be using our tax dollars to subsidize health care automation. This approach never works.
Panorama: Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology
Click or tap to view this handheld panoramic scene from the Penn Museum of Archaeology & Anthropology. Apologies for a few scene errors.
Farmer’s Market Photo
Denver Airport Storm Photos
Turbulence at the Michelin Guide
In the Paris banlieue of Boulogne-Billancourt, in an unprepossessing dark stone building, a French institution has a new address. The Guide Michelin had for decades been headquartered in the ultra-smart 7th arrondissement. But a few months ago, it packed up and moved out of Avenue de Breteuil, one of the most elegant streets in Paris, with its lawns, lime trees and direct view of the golden dome of the Hôtel des Invalides.
On the short walk from the Metro station to the new suburban office, I saw a small boy urinating in the street amid piles of rubbish, in the shadows of several grim-looking blocks of flats. It may have been unfortunate timing but it was difficult not to feel sympathy for the staff of the venerable “red book” – which remains, after more than a century of handing out and taking away good food stars, the arbiter of gastronomic excellence in France and beyond.One person who won’t be visiting this new address is Jean-Luc Naret, who quit as director of the Guide Michelin in December. It’s almost impossible to imagine this flamboyant globetrotter making the trip every morning across the Parisian “frontier” of the périphérique ring road.
US Federal Reserve Board Members Release Financial Statements
By Jeffrey Sparshott and Andrew Ackerman
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Federal Reserve Vice ChairmanJanet Yellen stands as potentially the wealthiest member of the central bank’s board of governors since joining in October.
Yellen reported assets valued between $5.1 million and $14.4 million, according to financial disclosure forms released Friday.The disclosure forms, used by officials across the government, report asset valuations and income only in broad dollar ranges and include spouses.
Clash of the Titans, Conclusion
In the first years of the Ford Motor Company, James Couzens had been more responsible than even Henry himself for its success. But Ford took a more active role in his company after the Model T debuted; and Couzens, who hated sharing power as much as Ford did, started looking for other outlets for his talent. His last great contribution to Ford was instituting the $5 workday in early 1914 – which kicked off America’s modern middle class.
However, Ford’s doubling the wages of its workforce was not taken well by other industrialists. The New York Times wrote that Ford’s largesse would create serious disturbances in America. The Wall Street Journal accused the company of “economic blunders, if not crimes;” while the president of Pittsburgh Plate Glass said, “This would mean the ruin of all business in this country. Ford himself will surely find that he cannot afford to pay $5 a day.”
James Couzens knew that all of these assertions were flat-out wrong. He’d run the numbers and predicted that the Ford Motor Company would make more money than ever. And it did.